Pages

Sunday, April 27, 2014

124. Exiles in New York, part 4

This is the fourth and last post about exiles in New York. It deals with some who came here as a result
of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the Fall of France.

Strife among the Gauls in exile

In the lobby of a New York hotel, during
World War II, the well-known French playwright Henri Bernstein, upon
encountering fellow French exile André Maurois, slapped him twice -- once, he
said, as a Frenchman, and once as a Jew.
“I shall pulverize you,” Bernstein reportedly warned Maurois. “I know how to hate. I shall ruin you. I shall isolate you. I shall reduce you to a position of
helplessness.” Such were the threats of
one noted French author against another, the two of them wartime refugees in
New York, and both Jewish. Nor was
Bernstein’s an idle threat. He quickly
launched a barrage of attacks on Maurois in the French-language press of the
U.S. and Canada, and spread rumors that Maurois was a Vichy sympathizer, a
fascist, a foe of the British, and an anti-Semitic Jew. What was this all about?

The collapse of France in the spring of
1940 had brought the end of the Third Republic and the installation, in that
part of France not occupied by the Germans, of the right-wing Vichy regime, with
Marshal Philippe Pétain, a venerable hero of World War I, as its head. But even as the Vichy government told the
French they must adjust to German hegemony in Europe and, in effect, make nice
with Hitler, General Charles De Gaulle had launched the Free French movement in
Great Britain so as continue the war against Germany. Every French citizen – and above all the
intellectuals, to whom many looked for guidance -- had to choose between Vichy
and De Gaulle, the newly established regime and the rebel. This conflict could assume a ferocity even
among the French exiles in New York.

Henri Bernstein

For Bernstein, coming to the U.S. was
easy: his mother was American, he had wealthy in-laws here, he spoke English
fluently and had visited here often.And
getting out of France was necessary, since he was Jewish.Only days after the Germans marched into
Paris in June 1940, he left for England and sailed from there to New York.Over here he lived sumptuously in the Waldorf
Astoria, with a sampling of his art collection on the walls, including a Manet
painting and a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing.A notorious womanizer, he took up with Eve Curie, the daughter of the
Curies of radium fame, and then with a popular singer.But when it came to politics and the war he
was a passionate supporter of De Gaulle, on whose behalf he wrote articles for
the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune and other
leading newspapers.After the war he
returned to France and continued writing plays until his death in 1953.

André Maurois, with a picture of Balzac on thewall behind him.

And Maurois? Also a Jew (he was born Emile Herzog), he had
done liaison work with the British army in World War I, making many British
friends, and had lectured in the U.S. and as a result entertained a very
positive feeling for the U.S. and its citizens.
In 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française, an honor coveted by
some and scorned by others among the French intelligentsia. Then, in June 1940, before the Germans
entered Paris, the French army sent him on a mission to England, where De
Gaulle tried to enlist him as a propagandist addressing the French from
London. He declined, fearing for the
safety of his family back in France, but also out of loyalty to Pétain, for
whom he felt respect and affection.
Instead, now demobilized, he accepted an invitation to give lectures in
the U.S. and set sail with his wife for New York, where the managers of posh
hotels, knowing him from previous visits, were glad to welcome him, assuring
him he needn’t worry about paying until he had earned some money in America. He and his wife stayed first at the Plaza,
and then in a small apartment on the 17th floor of the Ritz
Towers. Invitations for weekends in the
country followed. As I have noted
before, it pays to have connections, and Maurois had many.

But comfy living was no defense against
Bernstein’s attacks. When Maurois wrote
an article for Life magazine
stressing how the French loved Pétain and asserting – sincerely, no doubt, but erroneously
– that the Marshal’s more controversial measures had been taken under duress,
it could only have stoked Bernstein’s anger and intensified his hostility. Hence the two slaps in the hotel lobby, and
the outpouring of threats and hate. Maurois
was by nature a moderate who could see more than one side to an issue, and in
wartime moderates are not in great demand.

Though deeply hurt by Bernstein’s attacks,
Maurois lectured extensively throughout the U.S., stressing the menace of Nazi
Germany to an America that was still technically neutral, and trying to
convince skeptical audiences that France’s collapse was the result only of
military inadequacies, and not of moral decadence, corruption, and
defeatism. In New York he socialized widely
with Saint-Exupéry, Romains, and other French refugees, and numerous American
friends as well, and even had a chat with Eleanor Roosevelt, who appreciated
the positive effect of his lectures.

When the U.S. entered the war, Maurois played
a more active role in the struggle, going with his friend Saint-Exupéry to join
the Free French forces in North Africa, though what he did there isn’t clear. After the war he rejoined his wife in New
York, taught French literature at the University of Kansas City, Missouri,
where he imparted to the children of those middle regions, so rich in corn and
hogs, the glories of Proust and Balzac.
When he returned to Paris in 1946, he found that his apartment on the
Boulevard Maurice Barrès had been occupied by the nephew of Herman Goering, who
on departing had ordered all Maurois’s books removed or destroyed, the
furniture mutilated, the Aubusson and oriental rugs torn, and the paintings
carried off. Maurois was crushed by the
loss especially of his books and rare papers.
It would take him five years to reconstitute the library.

Jules Romains

Another French refugee in New York was the
novelist Jules Romains, whose decision to leave France was motivated in part by
the desire to protect his wife, who was Jewish.Sailing from Lisbon, they arrived in New York in July 1940 and took a low-priced
room at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44thStreet, a famous gathering place for writers,
journalists, and critics, where the management, knowing who their new guests
were, upgraded them to a suite.Then
they moved to the Hotel Mayflower on Central Park West at 61st
Street, where they ended up in a penthouse with a shared terrace: another
example of the advantage of being preceded by one’s reputation and having the
right connections.In New York the
French exiles were not skimping along in a garret, picturesque as that might
have been.

Romains’s political views were not likely
to please Bernstein, who was busy demolishing the image of Pétain that Maurois
at first tried to preserve. A pacifist
who had avoided military service in World War I, Romains had argued in the
postwar years that only a reconciliation between France and Germany could bring
lasting peace in Europe. This point of
view, which might have been laudable in the years following World War II, was,
to put it mildly, misguided and deplorable when he maintained it after Hitler’s
rise to power. But Bernstein never
attacked him with the vehemence he showed to Maurois. Romains participated in Voice of America radio
broadcasts, then in 1941 went to Mexico, where he had many friends, to join
with other French refugees in founding the Institut Français d’Amérique
Latine. By now he was done with pacifism
and gave lectures attacking Vichy. When peace came he returned to France, where
he was elected to the Académie Française in 1946.

Bertolt Brecht

Brecht, looking like a son of the people.
Bundesarchiv

The fiercely anti-fascist German playwright Bertolt
Brecht had collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill to create The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930),
both of which, savagely critical of capitalism, were great successes despite
the vehement protests of Nazis in the audience.When Hitler came to power in 1933, Brecht left Germany, lived for a
while in Denmark, and in July 1941, with his wife and harem (he always had a
harem) came to the United States, where he wrote some of his most famous
plays.An American who met him in New
York in 1946 described him as a short, wiry man with close-cropped hair and a
thin, bony face with a stubble of beard.Brecht, he reported, talked with a flow of nervous energy, his eyes
sparkling with a wry sense of humor, as he radiated a great force of will that
made him seem much younger than his age of 48.And he smoked cheap cigars.

Others were less generous, finding Brecht
contentiously arrogant, manipulative, and even, since he disliked bathing,
smelly. Thomas Mann called him a gifted
monster, and W. H. Auden, with whom he collaborated, remarked that Brecht was
one of the few people on whom a death sentence might be justifiably carried
out. Though born into a comfortably middle-class German family, in photographs
he always managed to look “proletarian” – close-cropped hair, plain clothes,
grim-faced or with a faint, sly smile -- and in so doing repeated the gesture
of Walt Whitman who, in the 1850s, presented himself to his readers as
working-class and “one of the roughs,” a parallel that Brecht, had he been
aware of it, would probably have rejected with disdain.

Though clearly an exile, Brecht was not
really an exile in New York, which he visited occasionally, since he settled
down in Hollywood -- the most curious of locales for an avowed Marxist in
proletarian garb -- and then in Santa Monica.
While still in Germany Brecht had known the U.S. chiefly through film
and fantasy, and the names of its cities and states had had a certain exotic
allure; now he could experience first-hand the glories and horrors of this
bastion of capitalism. The U.S., for
Brecht, was ignoble and loathsome, and Southern California a “Tahiti in
metropolitan form” where the air was unbreathable and there was nothing to
smell. Why was he there at all? Presumably because of the climate, the
presence of a German-speaking community of fellow exiles (Brecht never learned
English), and the possibility of making money in Hollywood (which he never
did).

When the Cold War took hold, Brecht’s
avowed Marxism got him into trouble.
Summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he
testified that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, but smoked an
acrid cigar that made some of the committee members slightly sick; the very
next day he left the U.S. for Europe. In
1949 the offer of his own theater where he could fully realize his vision of
epic theater induced him to return to Berlin, but to East Berlin in
Communist-ruled East Germany, where his Berliner Ensemble became
world-famous. A canny Marxist, he
retained his Austrian passport while in East Germany and stashed the money from
the Stalin Peace Prize, which he received in 1955, in a Swiss bank
account. His detractors are quick to
point out that he never denounced Stalin’s atrocities or the oppressiveness of
the East German regime, but he influenced U.S. and European theater to a
remarkable extent. He died of a heart
attack in 1956 and is buried in Berlin.

Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya

Goggle glasses and a patterned bow tieperched at his throat like a butterfly:most definitely a bourgeois.
Bundesarchiv

The German composer Kurt Weill was born
into a middle-class Jewish family and was composing music by the age of thirteen.Photos show him, young or old, as a good
bourgeois, serious, unsmiling, tightly buttoned and neat, with glasses – a far
cry from Brecht’s proletarian (or pseudo-proletarian) image.In 1924 he met Lotte Lenya (an assumed stage
name), an actress of Viennese working-class origins, whom he married in
1926.Though no classic beauty, as an
actress and singer she had great stage presence, an untrained soprano voice
that was unforgettable, and a raw, gutsy quality that suited perfectly the work
of Weill and his collaborator Brecht, and that brought her instant fame in the
role of Jenny in The Threepenny Opera (1928).Though hard to classify – opera, musical, or
play with music? -- this work, an adaptation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), was an immediate success, treating audiences
to a world of thieves, murderers, and prostitutes that shocked and fascinated
them.By 1933 it had been translated
into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages.

Not a great beauty, but incrediblydynamic on the stage, unforgettable.

In spite of this success, Brecht and Weill
soon distanced themselves from each other, primarily because, by 1929, Brecht’s
ideas were tinged more and more with Marxism, and he was becoming increasingly
opinionated and dictatorial.The rise of
Hitler’s National Socialist Party put Brecht, Weill, and Lenya in danger, since
they were known leftists and Weill was Jewish.Lenya was now living with the singer Otto Pasetti, and early in 1933 she
initiated divorce proceedings against Weill, which may have been in part a
tactical move, since it would let her reclaim some of his assets that might
otherwise be seized by the Nazis.When
Hitler came to power in March of that year, Weill and Lenya fled Germany
separately.The pending divorce did not
keep Lenya from performing in Brecht and Weill’s sung ballet (ballet chanté) The Seven Deadly Sins, which opened in Paris in June 1933 to mixed
reviews and would be Brecht and Weill’s last collaboration.Three months later Lenya and Weill’s divorce
became final.But by sometime in 1934
Lenya’s affair with Pasetti was over, and after a brief fling with the
Surrealist artist Max Ernst, she became reconciled with Weill, who had been
having an affair of his own with Erika Neher, the wife of the renowned set
designer Caspar Neher, who worked closely with Brecht.In spite of their infidelities, Weill and
Lenya always remained friends and collaborators and finally resumed their
relationship.Even in free-living
artistic circles old friends, it seems, are best.

In September 1935 the, dare we say, happy
couple came to New York, residing first at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park
South (not exactly a refuge for the impecunious) and later in an apartment at
231 East 62nd Street; they married again in January 1937. Convinced that his scores in Germany had been
destroyed by the Nazis, Weill broke dramatically with his German past, speaking
and writing German rarely, and studying American popular music so as to create
works completely different from what he had done in Germany. Unlike Brecht, he and Lenya adapted to the
capitalist American society and prospered.
His American works never matched the earlier ones in bite, but some of
his creations, notably “September Song,” had remarkable success. There are those who argue that his American
career was not a sharp break with his past, but simply a new phase of it, but
I’m not convinced. It’s quite a leap
from “Mack the Knife” to “September Song,” and I can’t believe that any of the
Broadway musicals he helped create had the keen edge of The Threepenny Opera, where Mack the Knife pronounces, “What is the
robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of one?” (a statement that might
well have resonance today).

Weill and Lenya moved into a house of
their own in New City, Rockland County, in May 1941. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and died of
a heart attack in a New York hospital soon after his fiftieth birthday on April
3, 1950; for weeks afterward, Lenya was so distraught that neighbors were
afraid to let her stay alone at night.
Despite the off-and-on infidelities, her life had been intimately linked
to his ever since their first meeting in 1924.

After Weill’s death Lenya, who in turn
became a citizen in 1944, returned to the stage and performed memorably as
Jenny in Marc Blitzstein’s brilliant 1955 Off Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de
Lys in the West Village, a production that I was privileged to see twice. The first time, worn out from a long trip by
car back from vacation on Cape Cod, I was swept along into the theater by some
adventurous friends who followed some other people in, and so witnessed a dress
rehearsal where I kept telling myself that this was a remarkable production,
even as I caught myself nodding off and pinched myself awake.

The second time I saw Threepenny I was fully rested and alert, and confirmed my first
impression that this was a remarkable event, and her now husky voice
inimitable. From then on I was a devoted
fan of anything that Brecht and Weill had worked on together, and anything that
Lotte Lenya sang or performed in; she became a part of my New York
experience. I will never forget her
rendering of the song “Pirate Jenny” in The
Threepenny Opera, where she plays a lowly and exploited hotel maid who
imagines a pirate ship coming into the harbor to avenge her; when the pirates
ask if she should kill some or all of the people, she answers tersely, in the
German version, “Alle,” in that one short word conveying unforgettably the
resentment and hatred toward their masters of the downcast and oppressed.

In the 1950s “Mack the Knife” became
popular in the U.S.; you couldn’t avoid it.
I loved the song but was troubled by its new status as a hit show tune
that every pop singer wanted to have a crack at; divorced from its context in The Threepenny Opera, it was less
sinister, less haunting.

Another New York triumph for Lotte Lenya
was George Balanchine’s City Ballet production of The Seven Deadly Sins, newly translated by W. H. Auden and Chester
Kallman, which opened in December 1958. The main character, Anna, is presented as a split personality. Lenya had the
speaking and acting role, the rational Anna, her face framed by orange hair and
bangs, with bold red lips and garish mascara, a grotesque appearance suggesting figures out of German Expressionism, the flagrant streetwalkers of Kirchner or the caricatures of Gross. The dancing role was performed by Allegra Kent, who would experience
the seven sins in seven cities of a mythological America. By way of introduction Lenya informed the
audience in her inimitable down-to-earth voice, with a glance at the lovely
young dancer, “She’s the good-looking one; I’m practical.” In the original 1933 production by George Balanchine
in Paris, Lenya had done the same role with Tilly Losch as the dancer, with the
two of them about the same age and Losch bearing a remarkable resemblance to
Lenya. In this New York production the
fact that Lenya was 60 and Kent a mere 21 seemed irrelevant, given Lenya’s effectiveness in the role. As the two Annas seek their fortune and
encounter the seven deadly sins in the cities of America, a male quartet (with
the mother a bass in drag, another grotesque Expressionist touch) watch smugly and receive their earnings, which they
use to gradually build a little house for themselves. Needless to say, the quartet represents the
capitalist bourgeoisie exploiting the
labor of workers. I’ll never forget the
quartet’s insistent repetition:

Lazy
bones are for the Devil’s stockpot.

Lazy bones are for the Devil’s stockpot.

I saw the ballet twice and
was overwhelmed by it. Amazingly, it was
not revived by City Ballet until 2011.

From 1960 on Lenya lived in an apartment
at 404 East 55th Street in New York.
In 1961 she appeared in the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone as the
enterprising Contessa who helps Vivian Leigh find a young Roman lover; for her
performance Lenya was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress. She would marry again three
times but, being determined to promote the works of her deceased husband, in
1962 she created the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music and oversaw vigilantly the
revivals of his works, even to the point of attending rehearsals script in hand
and following the performers line by line.
More performances and recordings followed, and more honors. Keeper of the flame even when her own life
was sputtering out, in her last days she embraced the acclaimed opera singer
Teresa Stratas as her successor in keeping Weill’s music alive. Stratas moved in with her to see her through
her last days as she succumbed to cancer.
Lenya died on November 27, 1981, aged 83, and was buried beside Weill in
Haverstraw, New York.

Source note: For information on Bernstein, Maurois, and
Romains in New York, I am indebted to my longtime friend and comrade in the
study and appreciation of French literature and culture, Jeanine
Parisier-Plottel. Bernstein’s attack on
Maurois is recounted in Maurois’s Mémoires;
though Maurois doesn’t identify his attacker by name, it is obviously
Bernstein.

This is New York

Jorge Royan

Coming soon: A post on Remarkable Women: a prostitute’s
daughter who slept in an empress’s bed, married and divorced an ex-vice
president, and hobnobbed with ex-kings and a future emperor.

Subscribe

What subscribers get: occasional notices of a book of mine being published, interesting reviews of my books, notice of my appearance at a book fair.
What they won't get: a steady stream of e-mails that wear their welcome out.